The two 1966 editorials from the People’s Daily reprinted here relate to the themes touched on in our discussion of the Ghost Festival. In the first, ‘Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons’, published on 1 June 1966, in effect declares all enemies of the Communist Party and its enterprise, including those who have survived from the days before 1949 living in the People’s Republic of China, to be little more than subhumans.… Read

This section starts with two passages from the writer Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881-1936) on the subject of ghosts, death and revenge. Gloria Davies has kindly given permission for us to reproduce here her discussion of Lu Xun’s essay-memoirs ‘Wu Chang or Life-is-Transient’ 無常 (1926) and ‘The Hanged Woman’ 女吊 (1936) from her Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.… Read

The following episode is from Chapter 102 of The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes 萬境歸空, translated by John Minford, Penguin Books, 1986. Charms and Holy Water are Used to
Exorcize Prospect Garden 大觀園符水驅妖孽   Skybright’s cousin, Wu Gui, lived, it will be remembered, opposite the rear gate-house of the Garden.… Read

During the Six Dynasties [六朝, 220-589 CE] a new prose genre, the zhiguai 志怪 tale [or ‘tales of the strange and supernatural’], emerged clearly from the mass of occasional writings of China’s literati.… Read